Campaign management generally involves the management of campaign activities directed to groups of existing and/or prospective customers. Typically, a company engages in a marketing campaign as a way of communicating specific business messages. For simplicity, all the recipients of such business messages will here be referred to as customers, whether or not they have an existing customer relationship. The messages usually can be any kind of business communication, such as everything from a pure advertisement to a direct offer that the customer may accept. Frequently, the company running a marketing campaign seeks an initial response from customers to gauge interest in the subject of the campaign, and then intends to use the responses in designing and directing further campaign activities.
The customers are often contacted by conventional means such as by letter, telephone, email or a personal visit, but other channels of communication are also possible, such as facsimile and specially designed web sites. The partial computerization of these activities has allowed marketing campaigns to be executed toward larger target groups with increased efficiency. For example, a computer-based marketing campaign can transmit several hundred thousand emails or more to a selected target group.
However, the usefulness of being able to direct campaign activities to large target groups is significantly reduced by difficulties in managing the responses from customers in the target groups. Even a modest response rate from the customers may produce a tremendous number of responses if the campaign is directed at a very large target group. And if the response rate is sufficiently high, the volume of responses may simply be unmanageable for non-automated processing. Every received response should also be matched with the campaign activity that triggered it, a task that becomes increasingly difficult when a company has several marketing campaigns running at once.
It has been attempted to solve this problem in some existing campaign management systems for a limited category of marketing campaigns, namely campaigns where emails are sent to customers and where customers respond by email. A system may include a campaign identifier in emails sent to a target group. If a customer includes the identifier when responding to the marketing campaign—for example by sending a response email incorporating the original email—the identifier may allow the company running the campaign to identify the response with the campaign that triggered it.
However, even such solutions may be insufficient to overcome certain significant problems with automated campaigns, because some responses arrive through different channels of communication than the one used for the campaign activity. For example, a customer who receives a marketing letter may decide to respond by an email or a phone call to the company running the marketing campaign. Or a customer who is contacted by telephone may later send a fax to the company as a sign of interest in the subject of the marketing campaign. If customer responses are received but never matched with the campaign, or detected too late to be taken into consideration for subsequent marketing activities, these responses may be essentially worthless to the company. Additionally, the customers may become frustrated if their responses go unanswered or if the company appears slow in reacting to them. The marketing campaign may then partly become a wasted effort for the company. Successful campaign management requires the ability to reliably detect customer responses received through a multitude of communication channels and to efficiently match them with their respective campaign activities.